The closer we get to the end of the year, the more I am sure I want these posts to be as short and as actionable as possible. Today, we're centering on a simple idea.

"You can't DAO alone."

If you've been in crypto for any length of time, then you likely know someone who works as a delegate or just some sort of governance professional. The value to DAOs for that type of profession is obvious. People who have been around long enough to understand what decision-making systems have been working well and what systems should be avoided, are critical to the long-term success of any sort of decentralized community.

What may be less obvious, however, is that for governance systems that these people employ to work, you also need some sort of set of project managers monitoring the minutiae on a daily basis. That means having people whose sole job it is to track metrics like voter participation, forum participation, proposals made, proposals made by category, proposals supported or rejected(by category, and otherwise.

While the governance leads create and tweak the systems, these people monitor everything to ensure the leads can do so in the best way possible. You don't succeed in DAOs alone. In any sense.

Now take that same principle and apply it to a DAOified grants program, such as what we have at Push DAO.

You need someone or more than one someone to see the big picture and the ideal smaller pieces that make it run efficiently.

You also need a team to deal with day-to-day requests from grantees, reviews, and review+progress related meetings. DAOs need multiple lines of defense. Strategists and those who live to be on the field.

And above all else?

You need as many people as possible who are both core contributors and naturals with people.

Real empaths.

I've seen plenty of decentralized communities fail because they have all the technical talent in the world but essentially no one like this.

The gold lies in having both.

We'll scale DAOs to new heights once we prioritize more empaths who are also technically talented, at the delegate/leadership level and throughout every piece of the DAO stack. That way you avoid all sorts of problems that stem and scale from simple people-to-people miscommunications.

If I could sum all this up in a phrase, I'd say, "let's prioritize super-communicators in DAOs."

Want to know more about all of this and what it leads to/how we're doing the same at Push DAO?

Stay tuned for next week and if you want to contribute to Push DAO or build something together, reach out to us at gov.push.org.

This one's even shorter and sweeter.

As Devcon and the bull market continue to catch fire , I've been noticing an uptick in discourse surrounding where we, as builders, should place more of our focus.

My answer is simple and two-fold.

Let's finally agree to support more genuine apps. In doing so, we won't be quitting on other niches such as infra. We'll be finally building bridges strong enough to kickstart and sustain our journey across the chasm.

Before we get there, though, we have to double-down on supporting the development and scaling of apps, both in a monetary sense and otherwise. Yes, that means more app-focused programming at conferences. That also means agreeing that what we have right now are a bunch of attractive, yet sparsely populated cities that need to be populated to grow.

In other words, we've made great progress, but even in this bull market, it's evident that we need far more users. Let's start with incentivizing the sort of apps that are hyper-targeted to get us there. Let's agree on what those are, on what consumer crypto means.

To me, "consumer crypto," is somewhat of a loaded term now.

What we should focus on, above it all, is creating apps that fulfill a true need of a meaningful part of the global population, using the wonderfully unique benefits that we, as an industry, have to offer.

Intuitive on the front-end.

Crypto on the back-end.

I'm not saying we do away with more technically-focused apps. They have a place and always will. I am saying that to hit widespread adoption, we need to actually double-down on making people's lives easier in some way with a much larger subset of what we're building.

As one of my dear friends in this industry once said, "people don't want to have to think. They want to log-on and do what they need to or want to do, as easily as possible."

Let's start there.

What's next?

In honor of Devcon, I shifted a different topic forward because I think it's that much of a priority for all of us to continue to work on. Next time, we'll dig even further into how to craft proposals for DAOs that balance being results(KPI/OKR-driven) and pushing the boundaries of innovation.

Until then, thanks for reading!

Be on the lookout for a potential bonus post this week and the launch of our podcast this month! Follow us on Twitter for that announcement and if you believe in a future driven by DAOified apps and want to build something to help us achieve that, say hi in our forum!

These days, at Push, we're moving at breakneck speed toward something greater.

In that vein, I'm keeping these installments of practical tips from the forefront of DAOs, even shorter and sweeter.

Today, I'm thinking about balancing chasing OKRs with encouraging experimentation, under the umbrella of a DAO.

Let's dive in.

The Case for More Skunkworks

We're often too focused on "founder-mode."

Aligning ourselves with the right OKRs, KPIs, or whatever you want to call them under the microscope of an overarching master strategy is all well and good. In fact, it's necessary. Still, to DAO is to imagine things differently and push toward that point.

We need to cultivate on-chain organizations that have metrics they aim to achieve each month, each quarter, and each year, but also allow for moonshots. If we don't, we'll end up with corporations on open databases.

In recent years, a lot of what I've done is work with teams to help them understand how to hit that balance, how to be results-focused and at the same time, open up a fertile ground for innovation that looks far beyond models that have already worked.

When I think about how to spell this out in the simplest possible terms, I think about something my best friend once told me. "To truly push the world forward, someone has to take the first step." I'm paraphrasing here because we've said and done so much in our work together, but the point is still exactly as she intended it to be, in my opinion.

Someone has to be the pioneer, the one to step outside of the walls and look to settle somewhere else.

With the advent of Bitcoin and Ethereum, we began to show the world that the old ways of thinking and creating the structures that govern us are dead. When Protocol DAOs, Constitution DAO, Ukraine DAO, and all the DAOs we still have today came to life, we took that a step further and gave people an even more powerful preview into how things could be.

There are a lot of pieces that are stalling in the DAO machine. Voter turnout is still very low in the grand scheme of things. Skin-in-the-game hasn't been figured out yet and a lot of DAOs have less than 10 contributors that regularly run the show.

In many cases, those with the most tokens straight-up decide everything.

And yet, there's hope.

Quadratic funding, quadratic voting, tiered governance models with multiple levels of voters, DAOs which live off of a network's fees alone, and DAOs in which you can't buy your way in and you actually have to earn your voting power point the way toward where we're going.

Look to those championing these models even in these early days and you're already getting a glimpse of the next stage for all communities.

I fully believe this is true or I wouldn't still be here.

Still, to ensure that happens, we need to allow for even more experimentation across all of these areas and more within our DAOs and our on-chain communities at-large.

How do we do that?

Start with allocating a greater percentage of your yearly budget not just to grants but to internal R&D. Simultaneously, consider opening up the same category in your grants program. We often don't have all the answers in our existing circles. We need to go out and find that elusive group of builders who can make the right pieces fit.

On top of this, don't fall into complacency with your governance model. Grow it over time. See it as a living organism that changes as the majority of community sentiment changes.

We'll be walking the walk in this respect with Push DAO in 2025.

Stay tuned :)

What's next?

This content is very much an experiment in and of itself. I'm cutting these posts to be even shorter and even more to the point as we go. I was inspired by today's particularly turbulent geopolitical landscape to pen this reminder that we are working our way toward a better future and that DAOs are at the center of that future.

For any of you who do read this, I hope it gives you a bit of hope.

The world can and will be DAOified, on a gradient scale.

Not every organization or community will need to be fully controlled by the swarm and that's ok. Still, everyone will eventually be tipped forward into adopting pieces of the model.

Next time, we'll dig even further into how to craft proposals for DAOs that balance being results(KPI/OKR-driven) and pushing the boundaries of innovation.

Until then, thanks for reading!

Be on the lookout for the launch of our podcast this month! Follow us on Twitter for that announcement and if you believe in a future driven by DAOified apps and want to help us achieve that, say hi in our forum!

Last but not least, there are so many genuinely good people who inspire me every day in this space. Each week, I'll shout out a few.

If you're looking for some inspo of your own, follow: Schlomo, Carla, Pranshu, and Gozman.

See you next week!

More specifically, let's dig into where grants come in.

Today, many of the leading Web3/crypto grant programs, both by dollar amount and projects supported, are too expansive. We, as grant providers, need to narrow our focus to scale the development and usage of Web3-based consumer apps. Now, in saying that, I don't mean eliminating all other categories of grants.

I mean hone in our KPIs and double-down on everything that can be considered consumer-facing, within a unified strategic framework.

For example: let's say the driving strategy for a particular chain's grants program in the new year is: "transition from driving integrations with our tech to driving the development of native apps on our tech stack."

An integration-focused strategy might track, above all else, track: the number of projects brought in from grants that successfully integrated with the protocol, the growth in user numbers of those integrations, and the growth in transactions or messages sent via those integrations(depending on the protocol's focus).

When such a program reaches a critical mass of say, several hundred successful integrations, it might be the ideal time to conceptualize what's next. By this, I mean that the next step of the protocol's master plan needs to become the north star of what the grants program focuses on.

This might be many things, but for the purposes of this piece, let's say that next step is: "becoming a major hub for consumer-scale applications in web3."

Those 3 integration-focused KPIs need to then be transformed to account for this.

First and foremost, going from number of successful integrations to number of "successful apps" or something similar, doesn't really work. It's too vague. What I'd suggest is setting the program's leading KPIs to something like: "number of 1000+ DAU/MAU apps signed on to the program(this is a proxy for potential flagships), average churn from the app(as a proxy for a smooth vs. not so smooth UX), and milestones reached that indicate a deeper usage of the protocol's tech rather than mere, simple, level one integrations."

This third KPI, I've left purposefully vague because it needs to fit into exactly what the protocol involved is. If you've got a DeFi protocol, then it needs to focus on DeFi-specific applications that innovate on the protocol's tech stack. If you're protocol is more focused on social media, art creation and trading, or general communication, then you need to fit it to whichever applies.

Beyond KPIs, if you're dependent on a foundation, yet your grants program is community/DAO-managed, then you'll need to ensure all involved understand the exact need for a significant increase in budget as you shift to more of a true focus on consumer apps.

For now, a general metric I use is: if all of the above we've discussed is true, then your budget should 5-10x depending on the ecosystem's total available funds and the promised percentage-based allocations of those funds. To double down on consumer apps, you have to pay more, so to speak. At the same time, you should ensure that all funds are allocated within a careful framework.

Kick-off that effort with KPIs and you're off to an excellent start.

What's next?

These days, none of us have a lot of time to spare.

This is the new shorter format for these posts. Next time, I'll dig deeper into grants strategy for DAOs within this strategy of doubling down on consumer apps. If there's something you'd like me to dig into, reach out. I've been in this wild industry for almost a decade now and helping people and scaling decentralized communities are the passions that have kept me here.

Thanks for reading!

Be on the lookout for the launch of our podcast next month! Follow us on Twitter for that announcement and if you believe in a future driven by DAOified apps and want to help out, say hi in our forum!

These thoughts were inspired by recent discussions I've had with two members of our DAO Council, Rene and SixtyKeys. Be sure to follow them too.

See you next week!

this one's short, yet sweet to spark some inspiration.

We've come so far with DAOified grants programs. I've spent the last few months thinking about how we go further. On how we disrupt the status quo once again. Here's an in-roads.

Where Ecosystem Grants Programs Stand

Right now, we're at a cross-roads. We've had a Cambrian explosion of infrastructure to support all sorts of potential use cases. DeFi still reigns, with the bulk of our ecosystem grants funding going toward projects in its sphere.

To cross the chasm, we need to put our money where our mouths are.

We need to walk the walk and double-down on consumer applications. This means applications that are intuitive to use, fulfill a need or want or both for a meaningful market segment, and abstract away the bulk of the complexity that web3 users face today.

The Shift We Need to Make

We need to level up our ecosystem grants programs.

The why is simple.

The how will take a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck.

Right now, three major roadblocks are hindering our progress towards mainstream adoption of crypto/web3 applications. First, there's the fact that the more chains we make, the more difficult it gets for developers to get up to speed on all of the languages, SDKs, and tooling involved. Next, we're making progress but compared to today's household names, the web3 applications we have today aren't at all easy to use. Then there's what our grants programs incentivize. Right now, the trend is to fractionalize support across education and events, content and marketing, integrations, dev tooling, governance, security/bug bounties, and several other categories.

In my experience, the list keeps going.

Now, don't get me wrong.

All of these areas need to be supported.

If we want to engineer break-throughs in web3 consumer apps, however, then the money needs to flow in that direction. Wherever it comes from, as a grants budget grows, the percentage allocated to applications that really push us to new heights need to increase.

How do we define these applications?/What is needed?

While a lot will vary here, depending on the ecosystem involved and its vision, certain elements will remain constant.

Every ecosystem(such as L1s and L2s) with any meaningful traction should be moving from the more integration and education heavy approaches to grants to a focus on consumer apps, in 2025. Grant evaluators should focus on both early-stage apps and apps that are working to pivot to being far more usable, to something that makes an everyday person's life easier in some fashion, and/or has a vision that is so compelling, people need to be a part of it.

These ideas are just the start of re-defining what we're looking for.

Some are doing this already. Some aren't.

If we dig down further and ask: what makes a web3 app usable, then we can say that evaluators should be looking for apps that utilize some form of chain abstraction, make the login process far more like web2(using a unified ID in human readable characters), and take away as much of the complexity that web3 brings(today) from the user.

The bulk of the above also applies to the question of what apps make people's lives "easier."

For now, I'd like to also add: builders with a commitment to truly treating their apps as experiences that can "always" be made simpler, should be prioritized by grants evaluators/councils/whoever holds the key to the funds.

As for the question of vision, think of your favorite apps. Think of your favorite companies. Extend that to sports teams or musicians.

Why do you buy from them/follow them?

Something they said/have done resonates with you on a deeper level than you may realize at this moment.

Seek to build apps that do that. Make it impossible for people not to be users because the community is so strong from the beginning. If there's one thing I've learned in my near-decade in this space, it's that vision and a commitment to community is the rocket fuel that sets you apart in the earliest days.

Evangelists/power users/people that need to be pioneers on your app will help you take that to new heights.

What's next?

Beyond shifting the priorities of the grants programs we have now, we need something more.

We need, as I've hinted at in the past, a DAO of DAOs for web3 grants, focused solely on consumer apps.

I've seen flashes of activity indicating that this will happen.

All it'll take to push us into a full paradigm shift is a coalition of forerunners(DAOs, apps, individuals, and other decentralized communities) and a moment in which they announce their commitment to hyper-scaling grant impact in this fashion.

This DAO of DAOs will start with what we've discussed here and build forward.

Getting there won't be easy.

But I believe the next moment for DAOs is this.

We had "the DAO." We had "Gitcoin DAO." We had "Ukraine DAO." We had "Constitution DAO." Now, I believe, our next major moment is the DAO of DAOs for grants.

This an idea I've been kicking around for quite some time and these posts are my sandbox of sorts for rough thoughts on all things DAO. Next week, I'll build upon all of this. Fully defining what sorts of consumer applications/proposals for consumer applications should be accepted as grantees bears a series of posts on its own. Digging into what sorts of governance considerations need to be made for the next stage of our grants programs does as well.

If you've come this far, seriously, thanks for reading.

I've been in this space for what feels like a lifetime and I'm sticking around because I truly believe in the power of the builders here, the power of the ideas we built this industry on, and the power of DAOs.

Remember, you can and should connect with us at any time on the Push DAO governance forum or via the Push DAO X account!

there's a common misconception that to DAO is to launch something run by a swarm, without any clearly defined roles. That couldn't be further from the truth.

DAOs need structure.

In my experience, that also means they need clearly defined workstreams, which include leads for those workstreams.

People need structure to stick around.

If you want to build a DAO to change how we develop and distribute medicine, then you need the right vision, the right groups, and the right alignment for it. VitaDAO's a good benchmark for something like this. Yes, they're focused on longevity but both require scientists and technicians experienced in the niche and both require someone to take the treatments developed to market.

This second group has to include deal-flow professionals, operations managers, salesmen, and any other position you can think of if you imagine a medicine reaching patients.

To put it even more simply, there's creating the treatment and there's packaging it and distributing it. All groups need to have pre-set structures in MVP format from day one so when the DAO launches, everyone has a place to go.

Just because it's a DAO, doesn't mean it can't have something like departments. The key difference is that regardless of who leads the departments on a day-to-day basis, everyone can propose anything to vote on and pass, to improve the structure as a whole.

DAOs are, and always will be, collectively run.

To degrees. On a gradient scale.

And to me, they always will be better than any other way of doing business or building community. This doesn't mean, however, that everyone will shift to DAOs and everything will become DAOs.

It does, however mean that DAOs will be the dominant paradigm for any sort of organization that's vision-centered. For that to be clearer, we need to take DAOs further.

With some of my dear friends who have been building longer than me, I've been thinking about what that means. About how we qualify "further," and what the next key moment is.

This week, I realized, we need to reimagine what the DAO tried to do back in 2016.

We need a DAO of DAOs for grants, with one vision uniting everyone involved and more funding than any singular program can provide, all focused on the apps of the future. If we don't do that, we'll lose our way for a while longer and web3 will take far longer to coalesce into the norm.

Next week, I'll dig deeper into this idea of a DAOs of DAOs. Until then, thanks for reading and remember, we can connect at any time on the Push DAO governance forum or via the Push DAO X account.

this one's a spark, to set an eventual fire of inspiration.

A DAO is supposed to be a fairer, better way of coordinating a group around a vision. Whether we're talking about profit or non-profit efforts, the aim is for it to be an improvement on the status quo of all businesses and communities.

Sure, examples like Maker DAO, VitaDAO, Uniswap DAO, Synthetix's DAOs, Constitution DAO, and Ukraine DAO exist. All of them have made considerable impact as stewards for protocols and their ecosystems, holding structures for scientific IP, collectively-run charities, and beyond.

Still, the top DAOs are run by a select few, most of whom are deep-pocketed individuals with considerable experience in the space. 1 token, 1 vote still reigns as a governance model and paths to contributor growth are opaque at best and non-existent at worst.

We're seeing Quadratic funding and voting, as popularized by Gitcoin. We're seeing multi-tiered governance, as Optimism currently espouses, and yet, 1 token, 1 vote still reigns.

In the early days, it makes sense for this to be the case.

A DAO needs to be more tightly controlled until it scales and there are experienced contributors beyond its founding team, ready to take on weight, both in votes and in responsibility. In my experience, however, once you hit the 12-month mark of a DAO being active in a form that has led to consistent growth, it's time to upgrade governance.

What that means in practice, varies on a case-by-case basis, with two elements remaining identical across all instances. The measure of quorum, aka the number required for a vote to be successful, needs to become dynamic instead of a static number. Imagine quorum as 10% of a DAO's token's supply. Now imagine that after a year, that becomes situational, such as a 20% threshold when a DAO's delegates are split on an issue.

Alternatively, imagine that a DAO is largely run by 3-5 ambassador hubs plus a group of 10 or so delegates. A dynamic quorum could mean that if all delegates are in agreement on a vote, that is its outcome.

I wouldn't, however, recommend structuring things in this fashion because it truly turns the DAO involved into something like an oligarchy.

Let's say that each ambassador hub has 10 ambassadors and there are 4 hubs. Now, what if a dynamic quorum is achieved when: 26 or more ambassadors vote and when 6 or more delegates are in agreement on said vote.

That's a structure I could get behind, with the right added considerations for voting power attached to it. Imagine you've decided that your DAO will determine the quorum needed for each vote to pass in that fashion. Now you need to also spell out voting weight.

Think about that same DAO, with 10 delegates and 40 ambassadors, with 10 participating in each ambassador hub. If you have 4 million tokens and you're just starting a DAO like that, how many does each group get?

How does that allocation evolve?

Voter weight plus quorum are the two most important considerations in a governance system once you've already sorted out the basics. Even so, they're often forgotten for long periods after a DAO's launch, leading to all sorts of issues.

Keep people assigned to researching and implementing solutions in these areas, in perpetuity, and your DAO will be in a far better place than most.

For now, thanks for reading friends.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Gitcoin, Nouns, and everyone innovating with new and better governance systems than 1 token/1 vote. My main point is its early and we can and will do a lot more, starting with educating the world on why more is needed.

We're in the quickest industry in history and we don't have a lot of time. These blogs are kept short to account for that. Each issue will build up more and more of a library of practical considerations for those building in the DAO-sphere, at any level. If there's something you want to see mentioned, let us know!

Remember, we can connect at any time on the Push DAO governance forum or via the Push DAO X account. Next week, I'll dig into how workstreams play into governance upgrades but for now, here's to a future that's more collectively run!

First, what happened to Weekly DAO Thoughts #2? IDK. Paragraph deleted it.

But, we move on with a bit of a repeat with a bit of a different slant.

I've been thinking a lot about what DAOs need to do to cross the chasm.

To step far over the walls we have here, so to speak, and into wider, deeper use cases.

And to me, three key actions reign supreme.

1. Any DAO that launches to support a protocol over the long-term, i.e., to act as the community-led vehicle to protect and scale said protocol, should have a meaningful share of said protocol's fees, in perpetuity, or it will fail. You might think this is a given, but it isn't. How do we define meaningful? It varies but to me/in my experience, it needs to hit over 1%. Justify how anything should keep a Protocol DAO at 1% or lower and I'll change my thinking here. We need to ensure this from day one and stick to it, budget-wise and otherwise. Any Protocol that plans to launch a DAO needs to have it prominently in every bit of its messaging, to investors, to the general public, etc...

2. DAOs need to kickstart more events, more accelerators, more revitalization projects, more classes, more support for students, and in general, more impact. The sky's the limit here and I'm bullish. This is not a waste of money. Those who sit in that camp are short-sighted and don't see the greater strategy in doing so, which to put it simply is, to "show the world just how much impact we can make with the next paradigm, the next driving force for all communities." From that impact, we build even greater things. Creating public goods that just bring joy and help people is one step of many.

3. Think bigger. Think way bigger than investment DAOs, protocol DAOs and leadership vehicles for Dapps. Don't get me wrong, we need all of those. We also need businesses, communities, public goods, and more that just make a difference/solve a real problem first, with a DAO on more of the back-end.

Next time, I plan to get even deeper, even wilder with what I mean with these 3 actions or pillars.

For now, thanks for reading, and from one DAOist to another, keep your eyes peeled here for a growing library on all practical bits of advice on DAOing that I can think of.

If you want to discuss anything you've read or if you want to dive in and DAO with us, reach out to me anywhere on my socials, where my handle is usually @Expatcrypto3, or to all of us on the Push DAO Forum.

GN for now.

This one's a short one but it matters. To DAO is to know how to move towards full community control of an ecosystem intentionally. There are plenty of cases in which you need to progressively decentralize an ecosystem, and knowing what those are and some models through which to approach them will get you far.

That's DAOing, in practice.

It usually involves daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and multi-year steps to full community control and that's ok.

Progressive decentralization can lead to a more aligned, more secure ecosystem than a quick exit to the community can. This is the first of many posts, building on each other to show you exactly how to get there and why it matters.

Navigating the DAO-Scape

If you've been in the crypto industry for any length of time then you've likely noticed, there are more than a few kinds of DAOs. Some look like investment funds run by a collective. Some look like charities run in the same fashion. Others present themselves as a swarm of developers or designers or some other profession creating shared value for themselves and for clients/partners, they take on.

Still, more types exist, of which the most successful to date, by the value they create, maintain, and scale, are protocol DAOs or shared wallets, sets of rules, and other resources that all of the stakeholders of, an app or a chain use to run said app or chain.

Push DAO is, by and large, a Protocol DAO. Uniswap DAO is a Protocol DAO. Compound DAO and Synthetix's set of DAOs are the same, in terms of their function.

While some DAOs like on-chain charities or investment collectives can be launched at their full scale more swiftly, Protocol DAOs benefit from more time and more of an intentional approach.

Once you get why, it's easier to understand progressive decentralization matters and can lead to an ecosystem that scales higher than ever before. This post and every one that follows will only make that clearer.

Before we get too deep, however, let's start with the basics.

So you have a chain and a community, what now?

Let's say you have a chain and you want it to live up to its name of the decentralized hub for the future of consumer apps. You have a Foundation that houses the developers who made the chain possible. You have some initial grantees who are interested in building apps on your chain and you have a token and people who have bought that token.

Let's also add that you have a forum and a Discord where all of these groups discuss their ideas for the future of the chain and its ecosystem.

You've always planned to DAOify all of this.

Where do you start?

With the people.

Listen, Learn, Align

Whether you're the founder of the chain involved or just someone hired to decentralize its ecosystem, from day one, you need to be in the Discord and the Forum listening to the first community members who get active and what they choose to discuss regularly. Give that 3 months or so, sometimes less, let it build up to a critical mass of activity, and during that time, have discussions with your community on the vision for the chain since its launch and how that vision connects to what they see the ecosystem becoming.

In other words, find out what your community values.

That includes token holders, developers, grantees, and investors(who perhaps were in your seed round).

Everyone involved.

On every side of the growing ecosystem.

It's not easy but it's necessary.

Hold community calls, hold governance calls, call them whatever you want within reason but make them weekly, forever, and let the community be heard. In those first 90 days, build out what is commonly called your manifesto or your constitution and use that to guide you on your way to full DAOification.

Sometimes your community can take longer to align around your efforts and it may be best to build that document out in the first three, rather than six months.

There's no one-size-fits-all approach and it's a judgment call. Whatever timeline you choose to follow, you want as many of your members involved in the process as possible.

What is a DAO Manifesto/DAO Constitution, really?

It can be one page. It can be more. In all cases, however, it's the guidelines for the DAO as it grows, related to how it operates. Push DAO, as of now, is building its way towards a community-created constitution by the end of this year, which will be roughly six months since the start of the DAO in its current form via governance.

If there are any rules to use to guide you in the creation of such a pivotal document, it's the following:

• Start with a vision, like, "to be the pioneer in a world where our favorite apps are run by us, everyday people, not centralized corporations." See the mission section below for one tip on how to craft the best possible one you can.

• Center the rest of the document on that vision.

• Continue with values, i.e., what your community stands for and doesn't stand for, or in other words, what they will and will not do.

• Keep those values as simple as possible. Make them easy for anyone in the world to understand, not just deep crypto people.

• Add in a mission, i.e., a statement that tells everyone how you plan to achieve your vision. That will look something like this: "to make DAOing more accessible and more impactful than ever before, through a dedication to seamless UX across the board in the Dapp we govern and to shared value, for everyone in the community." This can be more or less specific, depending on what you're going for. I always recommend bringing in a strategic professional who is very experienced with not just crafting mission statements but using them with a vision and values to provably scale a community. If you don't have someone like this at launch, then go out and find them. Leverage all of your community's contacts to do so.

• Weave all of the above into a story. Why should someone care about what your DAO is all about if it's not presented compellingly? Think of the great presenters of our time, and draw inspiration from where it makes sense.

• In all of this, don't be overly technical. You need to write for the everyday person, even though at first that's not applicable. If we can't do that with our constitutions, then how can we educate the world on the promise of DAOs as a whole?

• End the document with a hyperlink to where you want to send everyone. Make it as easy as possible for them to get started, whether that's on your DAO's forum or elsewhere.

If you're focused on decentralizing the treatment of rare diseases, then you may have more of a gated sort of access to things, than if you're, say, focused on launching a collectively owned publication which anyone can, in theory, write for.

In either case, build your constitution in public with your community. Never do it unilaterally. From there, you can begin to make proposals and see which subDAOs, workstreams, programs, and overall improvements come from them.

Don't get me wrong, the opposite can also be true. A DAO can have a governance system before a constitution especially if it's very early and the founding members have a vision of reaching a certain scale before they push forward into a different, more robust leadership structure. Push DAO is one of these cases.

As the year goes on, you'll see how that plays out in practice.

In any case, thanks for reading, and from one DAOist to another, keep your eyes peeled here for a growing library on any and every practical bit of advice on DAOing that I can think of. Similarly to what I said last time, if you want to discuss anything you've read or you just want to dive in and DAO with us, reach out to me anywhere on my socials, where my handle is usually @Expatcrypto3, or to all of us on the Push DAO Forum.

GN for now.

You get a feeling when you see a DAO truly scale for the first time. It's the same feeling when a big trade goes right or when your marketing campaign results in significantly more usage of the product or network you represent.

Fulfillment.

Reaching that stage, however, involves crossing many initial hurdles. DAOing ain't easy. DAOing can drain you, just like running a startup can, if you're not careful. Myself and the team at Push DAO, the community-run growth engine for the Push Protocol ecosystem are kicking off these weekly letters to share tips we've learned from our efforts.

These are designed to be tips that anyone building any decentralized community with any degree of decentralized governance can use. Each week's issue will focus on one theme that can help you, as a leader or contributor, at any stage of DAOing.

Today's is a question: is there an ideal contributor that decentralized communities should seek out for leadership roles?

Flex vs. Static Types

In most cases, potential contributors are either "flex" or "static" types.

The former refers to those who can flow through several practical areas of a community and excel in each, as needed. The latter refers to those who do one thing or work within one specialization, exceptionally well.

Imagine someone who does audits for a government agency while moonlighting as an op/ed writer in their spare time. This person then reads up on DAOs, participates in different workstreams, and ends up putting together the governance framework of a leading DAO. Their framework is voted in and it becomes the guidepost and engine for how the community makes decisions. Now, they move on to another DAO, where they're voted in as one of the council members, making decisions and running the DAO in the community's best interest.

This is a flex-type to a T.

A flex type is similar to a floating COO, who can jump between all active subDAOs or workstreams as needed and fix any issues that arise, on a daily basis. It's important to note here as well that this is someone who needs their work to be this way.

A static type is the opposite kind of contributor. Picture a career editor who leads your content workstream or a meme-master who spearheads your social crew.

They're top performers in these areas but not outside of them. They don't leave their spheres of influence.

You need both flex and static types for your DAO to persist and scale.

If you have a council model, where a small group runs the show, all of these people should be flex-types. Static types can and should be workstream leaders and/or project managers.

Still, this is only a starting point.

No individual remains one type or the other.

Static types can become flex types and ascend in a DAO, given the right mix of autonomy and mentorship. Flex types can choose to hyper-specialize in one area if they find it's where the achieve the most success for both themselves and the community.

Push DAO: Flex Individuals Run the Show

I'll use the example of how we restructured Push DAO, when I arrived in March 2024 because it's particularly relevant here.

Imagine a high-potential DAO that's experiencing a significant drop in participation.

Let's say you're brought in as a change manager, to pivot that DAO to new heights.

Because it's a collectively-run community, you can't simply go into, say, the forum, and begin authoring proposals for the changes you believe are needed. You need to understand where it all started, where and why it stalled, and who is still there, still trying to move things forward.

From day-one, that's what I did.

I read through countless forum posts, dating back years. I combed through the history of the Push DAO Snapshot and I came to a singular conclusion. Four members kept coming back again and again, to author proposals, to support others' proposals, and to generally keep the community active.

These four members also came from unique varied backgrounds including: web2 marketing with some DAO and design experience, community management and developer evangelism, financial management and DAO tooling, and legal work with a bit of writing experience.

I brought these individuals into a GMeet and we discussed where they started in the industry, where they wanted to go, and why they stuck around with Push DAO.

From there, I unveiled my ideas for the first, second, and third years of the Push DAO pivot, making clear that the plan was purposefully unfinished, because we needed to finish it together.

In other words, I provided rough paths. From there, we began paving them and lighting them together.

It's a DAO right? Why would anyone buy-in to one person's vision?

This is a question that I get a fair amount when I share the beginnings of Push DAO's pivot. First, it was never my vision. I took the key points from their latest proposals and discussions, packaged them into a vision that I hoped would guide our efforts and asked them: "do you vibe with this? Is this how you would explain what you want Push DAO to become?"

After a few edits, they all agreed that it was.

Why?

To DAO successfully is to deeply understand other people, not just their working styles but the way they want to see the community evolve. If your DAO doesn't reach a consensus on this, then it won't work.

How do I reach a consensus on "vision?"

Assume almost nothing from day one, except the information that's right in front of you on the forum or wherever else the DAO discusses things. Make all determinations in public meetings from the get-go and let everyone be heard.

Finally, keep your vision simple and focused on an end-goal that you know everyone's on the same page on. Make that into a manifesto, or whatever you'd like to call the post where you share what your DAO is, why it matters, and where it's going.

Don't publish the manifesto until, for example, the DAO Council agrees on what is in it and the greater community has had a chance to weigh in on the process.

This isn't easy.

It can take weeks to come to a consensus but it's worth it to wait.

Your DAO won't work without flex individuals at the core and flex individuals are driven by a vision, rather than a department or a specialization.

These issues are meant to be as succinct and as actionable as possible. In my opinion, actionable, in the case of a piece on DAOs, means you read it and it inspires the creation of a new initiative or the taking of a new action. If any of this speaks to you, reach out any time on my X account, Push DAO's X Account, or introduce yourself on our forum and let's build something together!

Next time, we'll dig deeper on vision building, onboarding and practical structuring for DAOs. Until then, let's all keep building communities that are more equitable than ever before!

Ian

DAO Chef @Push_DAO